Earlier this year, we set out to discover how mid-market firms in Europe feel about big data; as a result we have published a whitepaper which explores the realities of the challenges and opportunities for these organisations. You can download the full whitepaper today or read a summary below. We have also created a 12-point cheatsheet, to help organisations get ahead of the storm.
The obstacles and opportunities for mid-size firms in Europe.

The challenge to the mid-market

A silent storm is surging across a landscape of legacy IT systems, outdated information management processes and rigid inter-departmental data silos; tearing them apart. This storm is called big data. Across Europe, mid-market firms are struggling to cope, overwhelmed by the volume and variety of information impacting the business. What can they do to meet the challenge and why is it so important that they do?

Earlier this year, we set out to discover how mid-market firms in Europe feel about big data. We wanted to understand their hopes and concerns, and gain an insight into the practical, everyday realities mid-market IT departments are facing when it comes to managing big data. We spoke to 760 front line information managers in different departments and business sectors in the UK, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain. Our whitepaper helps to explore these realities.

We explore and present
- The big picture on big data
- The obstacles: the everyday terror of terabytes
- The opportunities: business without boundaries
- Industry scenarios
- The big data reality checklist

The Big Data reality checklist

Obviously the challenge of big data is not one that can, or even should be solved in one day. However we believe that our 12-point checklist should help provide you with a structure that you can build on as the full impact of big data becomes clear. However if you will probably want to read full whitepaper to understand all that we have found, simply download it today.

Going to work on Big Data

1. Start at the end. Define the business goals and objectives and build your big data strategy around it.

2. Shrink the problem: make the challenge manageable. Everything is changing so rapidly that trying to find the perfect solution that addresses every eventuality is impossible. Decide on the information of greatest potential or risk to your business and focus your time and resources on harnessing that.

3. Get to grips with incoming data. Prioritise data coming in, understand what you need to keep and simply delete the rest. Big data can be messy; so don’t waste too much time cleaning everything that comes in – again focus on what you want to keep.

4. Have a plan for what’s left. Segment data by date, for example; anything older than a particular date can be archived on back-up tapes in a secure archive. Dispensing with junk mail alone could free up between 30 and 40 per cent of the data space on your servers. Tape remains the best medium for long term data storage: more environment-friendly and cost-effective than disk and more reliable and secure than the cloud.

5. Establish company-wide, scalable, big-data-resilient information management systems that will help you to channel, analyse or archive unstructured digital content such as emails and social media.

6. Know your legal obligations. In technology, law always lags behind practice and in the big data world it is particularly important to understand emerging data protection and privacy law around social media, real-time consumer data and location-based information.

7. Avoid analysis paralysis. Big data informs and enhances judgement and intuition, it should not replace them. Big data volumes have immense potential for improved decision-making, but can also cause delay as managers try to sift through thousands if not millions of data points in order to make a decision.

8. Opt for progress over perfection. Getting something in place is the most important. Design data management policies in good faith and them implement them consistently across the business. What you decide will touch everyone in the business so it is vital to get all employees on board.

9. Make it easy for all departments to see your information. People need access to the data, but they want it to be painless, transparent and easy. Ensure employees know how to search for and analyse the data so they can release its value. Integrate paper into the process by digitising it.

10. View the data in context. Data in isolation is essentially worthless. Don’t get so lost in the detail looking for patterns and trends that you lose sight of the big picture.

11. Consider your carbon footprint. Tape consumes a fraction of the power of disk, and even less than all that data stored in the cloud (which in reality means on a permanently switched-on, artificially-cooled server in a data center somewhere.)

12. Know where the data is and who is accountable for it. Always.

Download the full whitepaper today:
http://eu.ironmountain.com/forms/BigData

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